10,000 Earth & Ocean Scientists. Five days.

From the lithosphere to the blogosphere

Over the next week, I will be posting daily reports about what's happening at the American Geophysical Union fall meeting. This is the premier meeting in the field of Earth sciences, and it has the attendance statistics to show it: More than 10,000 Earth, space and ocean scientists will converge on San Francisco to present as many as 2,000 talks and posters every day, for a week. Check back during the day and each morning by 10 a.m. EST for the latest posts.

Two thousand 15-minute talks and 4' x 8' posters each day. A lesser blogger might ask you to imagine drinking from a firehose (about 20,800 lesser bloggers, to be specific). But in terms of information stream, AGU is more of an ocean current.

Put it this way: imagine the stream of water coming out of a firehose. Now add to that all the rest of the water in all the world's rivers. In oceanographic units, that flow rate is around 1 Sverdrup, or a million cubic meters per second. That's the scale at which oceanographers start measuring ocean currents (the small ones).

That's why WHOI sent a reporter like me to post about what's interesting, including some of the 186 presentations involving WHOI investigators, as well as hot topics from the rest of the Earth sciences world. Next week, we're expecting to hear about new results from research on hydrothermal vents, ocean ridges, earthquakes, a giant flood in the Black Sea and the workings of ocean circulation (Sverdrups and all).

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